TELEVISION VIEW

TELEVISION VIEW; Black Stereotypes: Reflections of Ozzie and Harriet

By Walter Goodman

Published: January 22, 1995

THE LITTLE BOOKLET THAT accompanies the Whitney Museum's current exhibition, "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art," comes down hard on popular culture, which these days means mainly television, for its stereotypes of black men. Although the museum apologia is not a reading treat, with its mix of socio-pop and gallery-pap, an alliance of the obvious and the dubious, one point is indisputable: the mass media thrive on stereotypes; no minority has been spared, black men least of all.

What the writer of the booklet, which reminds us of the once common depiction of blacks "as slaves, brutes or minstrel performers," fails to note is that for a generation or more, television stereotypes have been of a conspicuously different nature. For many a season, high-rated series have featured likable black families, with a father present and other members going to school or to work.

This benign stereotype is an updated version of the much derided Ozzie and Harriet arrangements of decades past. White audiences are evidently secure enough to handle a Murphy Brown, who breaks the mold (before turning into a new stereotype sometime during the first season), but when it comes to the domestic relations of America's blacks, there is still comfort for both whites and blacks in a vision of relatively conventional family life.

In a similar spirit, popular police series like "N.Y.P.D. Blue" and "Homicide" feature upright black detectives who often tangle with white bad guys. Blacks and whites have been mingling during prime time, including commercials, as long as youngsters now in their teens have been watching. The Whitney exhibition might have been more pertinent if it had been mounted 20 years ago.

But what about nonfiction television, which must rely on external events for its scripts? Does it call up what the museum reports to be a "constant stream of images that continue to feed imagination, instill unwarranted anxieties and muddle any sense of reality"? Here, too, the museum's account is outdated. Yet reality can indeed be muddled.

The tube's most prominent black men are athletes and entertainers. On the court, the field, the rap stage, they are heroes to both whites and blacks, particularly to the young. The degree of affection they inspire can be glimpsed in the nation's reaction to O. J. Simpson's troubles. But how do these champs score in the wholesome-image stakes?

The need of boys in single-mother homes for male role models has become a truism. Unfortunately, setting aside the fact that neither sports nor rap transmits pacific images, the personal lives of the favorites do not always conform to the Bill Cosby model. Moreover, their accomplishments have little to do with the classroom. If anything, they may give an impressionable viewer the notion that speed, strength and bad language will do for him what it has done for his heroes. (Stanley Crouch, that sharp black critic, observes that if whites were projecting the sort of dissolute images of black men featured on rap videos, the civil-rights establishment would be picketing. The Whitney ducks that uncomfortable subject.)

Elsewhere on the small screen can be found black news anchors, reporters and commentators as well as doctors, social workers, teachers and public officials who represent different roads to achievement. But not even a Colin Powell can compete in the dreams of most youngsters with a Shaquille O'Neal. The best one can hope is that the ever-increasing visibility of blacks who have made it off the court and outside the courtroom may stretch imaginations and offer alternative goals as teen-agers resign themselves to the fact that hoop and rant do not promise much of a future.

The Whitney is closer to the mark when it draws attention to "the mass media's representation of the black male as the embodiment of drugs, disease and crime." But even here it overstates by implying invidious intent. Referring to the 1989 rape of a jogger in Central Park, the booklet asks: "Why, after all, did this particular crime garner so much attention when more than 20 other rapes occurred in the city during the same week?" The implication is that press and television were attracted because this was an attack by a band of black youths on a white woman, confirming the white public's perception of young blacks as a threatening force.

Yes, race always counts, and one wishes that local news would find other subjects as fascinating as it finds rape. But you don't need racist motives to explain the jogger story's appeal. There was, to begin with, the setting of Central Park (where three years earlier the killing of a young white woman by a young white man, Robert Chambers, during a sexual encounter got plenty of attention) and the facts that the rapists were in their teens and the woman was beaten almost to death.

The abiding racial problem about crime stories in New York and many other cities is not an invention of television: violent crimes are disproportionately committed by young black men. As long as crime remains a staple of journalism, that lamentable reality will keep being rubbed in. Let's take consolation in the fact that viewers can also see on the nightly news black men who are police officers, judges and citizen heroes, just like those on the sitcoms and crime shows.

As is often and properly pointed out, the victims of crime, too, are disproportionately black. Would the jogger story have received quite as much television time if the woman had been black? Maybe not. But what if she had had a high-paying job on Wall Street? For news directors in search of grabbers, class can count more than race.

Television is open to plenty of criticism about the way it treats many subjects. It does not do justice to the variety of black life in America any more than it does justice to the variety of white life. Television news, like all news, by definition scants the ordinary in its addiction to the sensational and is typically short on background and context.

But the critics at the Whitney seem to be asking the camera to be blind to what everyone can see and to substitute other images, like those now on its walls. (That could be a problem for television audiences. Apart from not being exactly family fare, Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs, the exhibition's most striking element, would assuredly be attacked for feeding stereotypes about black males' preoccupation with sex.)

Television today doesn't seek out black muggers or ignore white ones; the camera is drawn to criminals and victims of every complexion. The disarray of inner-city families was not created by images on the screen and cannot be concealed by well-meant wishfulness or repaired by political pieties.